1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a braille print board.
2. Prior Art
When writing braille in the conventional manner, a braille printer comprising a tablet, a scale and a pen or a braille typewriter is used to project the braille letters from the back of a sheet of paper in horizontal lines from right to left. When reading braille text, one touches the raised points with the index finger successively from left to right. Although the above mentioned braille typewriter and braille stereotype printer have been available for some time, their high prices have limited their wide-spread use. Thus, blind people had to continue being dependant on the hand-made copies offered by volunteer braille writers.
Printing in braille is achieved by printing braille letters on lines equally spaced apart, and then printing on the back, of the sheet between the lines of the front side, so that the sheets are printed on both sides with braille letters. Printing using the braille stereotype printer was therefore cumbersome in that the sheet of paper printed on the front first had to be reversed for printing on the back between the lines of braille letters formed on the front of the paper.
As the braille stereotype of the above method could not be used repeatedly, this increased the volume of transcription to braille if the number of copies to be issued was to be increased.
The inventor of the present application proposed an improved stereotype in his prior inventions disclosed in Japanese Patent Application laid open under No. Sho-57-43894 and Utility Model Application laid open under No. Sho 58-48436. While the braille stereotype did improve workability of the conventional method, there still remained problems for the braille writers.
Of the above mentioned prior art, the former method used a plastic board having the same thickness as the projection height of a braille letter, formed continuous lines of holes for braille letters, one cell of six dots corresponding to the eye of the braille letter representing one character, adhered an adhesive tape over the line, and placed hard balls inside said braille letters to thereby cause respective 6-dot cells (one letter) to represent one braille letter. Alternatively, balls are retained by utilizing the adhesive force of the tape, and then balls not needed are removed. The latter invention adhered the tape over the dot cells of the braille board to retain the balls in the dot cells, and removed unneeded dot balls through the adhesive tape.
In order to remove the balls from the cells, a pen, etc. with a ball point is used. However, removing the ball by breaking through the adhesive tape was found quite difficult. Since the braille system depends a lot on the manual work of the volunteers as mentioned above, excellent workability is a requisite for widening the use of the braille system and increasing the number of volunteer workers.